Tremor Media Rocks New Web Video Ad Format

Tremor wants to rock your video ads by taking things to a whole new level of interaction and placement. No more will viewers have to wait for pre-rolls, tolerate mid-rolls or simply skip over post-rolls, or will they?

Tremor Media is now offering up what they call V-Choice which they say will bring together all of the elements of television advertising and handcuff it to control and interactivity that web viewers expect. V-Choice just finished a successful, so we’re told, beta test and is now being rolled out to over 900 sites with advertisers like Universal Pictures, Ubisoft and more.

Since the beta test was a box office hit they’ve decided that all advertisers and publishers can now start availing themselves of the system. Quantcast is doing metrics for both traffic tracking and demographics. They’re also handling the user interaction information, say that three times fast.

Bah! It sounds just like other video ads!

I’m surprised you say that. I haven’t even told you how it works. Well, here’s how it works.

User visits site with V-choice Ad

User is shown preview (5-15 sec) teaser of ad (pre or mid-roll) and can choose to skip the ad or see it.

Depending on the viewer’s choice (hence V-Choice I’m sure) the viewer sees the content or the ad.

You know what this sounds like to me? Yep, you guessed it, that new Nintendo Wii channel that Nintendo is working on where the viewers choose the ads they want. Wow, I guess Iwata really does know his stuff since ad networks are already imitating it.

Further user/viewer interaction includes choosing specific products from campaigns and length of ads that they see. So perhaps they like the Mach 3 from Gillette but don’t care about the V-Max or whatever the new product is, they simply choose not to see the ad.

In regards to film users might choose from a quick teaser, a short trailer or perhaps even the full-length trailer. That’s sort of cool actually.

Another option for advertisers is ‘storytelling’ mode where viewers can see campaigns in chapters and they have control over when they see them. Remember when commercials used to tell stories and you could string them all together and get a series of events much like an actual story? Well…they’re back! It’s an all new way to present marketing webisodes I guess.

I’ll just skip over the video ads thanks!

That’s the same thing I’m saying too. But Tremor’s CEO Jason Glickman told MediaWeek that only about 20% of consumers are choosing to skip over ads. So that puts you and me in the minority I guess. Anyway the brand still gets the 5-15 second exposure even then. I wonder if they’re charging per second of exposure of if it’s a nice flat fee structure that has advertisers paying for viewers to see just a 5 second teaser at the same rate they pay for them to see a full campaign worth of ads.

I’m curious to hear more like where the inspiration for this came from (NINTENDO!) and how pricing is structured and what packages will look like for advertisers and publishers. (That means if you’re reading this and are with Tremor or PR for them you should contact me…you’d be surprised how well this works for me.)

What’s it all mean Chris?

Well if you think back to the Nintendo article it means that users will decide what to see and when to see it. If they see anything at all that is. It could mean higher user interaction with the advertisements or it could simply mean that users click past them, which technically is user interaction of a sort. Either way it’s innovative and could not only change the way viewers see ads but also how ads are made and presented and the content of them. I have long held the belief that if the advertisements were interesting stories in their own right they would be fare more interesting to the consumer and more compelling to boot.

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